DARIAH-EU Working Group DHwiki at DH2025: FAIR data in the Wikibase Ecosystem workshop and tutorial

30min

• The Wikibase Ecosystem and Wikibase use cases overview (Christos Varvantakis)

  • In line with the Wikibase ecosystem joint vision, in recent years, a wide range of institutions, organizations, groups and individuals from the Arts and Humanities have adopted Wikibase to host their databases. From datasets established for research purposes, to databases aiming at the wider public, the Wikibase ecosystem embraces numerous and diverse use cases. In this introductory talk, we will discuss both the big picture of the use cases in the ecosystem as painted through various surveys and research, as well as we will have some more in-depth discussion of wikibase showcases.

Q&A

15 min

• Federated queries in the Wikibase ecosystem (Maximilian Kristen)

  • Federated queries are a cornerstone of a functional linked open data future, yet they remain largely theoretical for many Wikibase projects. Considering federation as a feature early, before finalizing the ontology of your own Wikibase, is crucial to simplifying the process down the line. During our workshop in Munich in early December 2024, we updated the relevant documentation and will now offer an improved set of examples and guidelines to support successful inter-Wikibase operations.

Q&A

15 min

• WikiFAIR: A guide for DH projects to better use Wikimedia technologies (Maximilian Kristen)

  • WikiFAIR is a proposal designed to help researchers make better use of existing Wikimedia infrastructure and tools. It emphasizes the collection of usage examples from ongoing projects and categorizes their methods into distinct, reusable operations. These operations are thoroughly described and documented within WikiFAIR, aiming to provide the scientific community with a clearer understanding of both the opportunities and challenges—technical and social—associated with leveraging Wikimedia tools and platforms in their work.

Q&A

break

15-20min

• DataLib: Towards a prosopographical database about the network of Libanius

  • Camillo Carlo Pellizzari di San Girolamo

  • DataLib (https://datalib.wikibase.cloud/) is a Wikibase instance about the 1544 Epistles of the rhetorician Libanius of Antioch (314−393), the biggest collection of epistles preserved from the Antiquity. It contains the numbers attributed to the Epistles in their editions and translations, and the dates (converted into EDTF format) attributed to them in the Foerster edition (Foerster 1921-1922), which is still the critical edition of reference today. The curators plan to add new statements to provide a coherent classification of the letters by topic and, most importantly, to connect each letter to all the people it mentions, in order to construct a reliable prosopographical database about the network of Libanius.

15-20min

• ENEOLI Wikibase: Connecting bibliography and meta-terminology of the domain of Neology

  • David Lindemann, Ana Salgado

  • This Wikibase instance (https://eneoli.wikibase.cloud) serves as a collaborative platform for developing a multilingual vocabulary for neology. It combines conceptual tries with lexical entries (terms in multiple languages) identified in scientific articles from the domains of lexical innovation, lexicography and terminology. Articles are collected in Zotero, along with their publication metadata and full texts. These are processed to extract terminological data, which is then added as content-describing metadata describing the publications in Wikibase. This setup enables advanced queries, such as analyzing term co-occurrence, concept usage over time, and author-term relationships while supporting ongoing collaboration on a living resource, across ENEOLI working languages.

15-20min

• Mapping DH Wikibase

  • Christof Schöch, Maria Hinzmann

  • At the Trier Center for Digital Humanities, we’re continuing the integration of LOD into our toolbox that we have started with MiMoText. One among several use cases using Wikibase is Mapping Digital Humanities, an initiative whose goal is to document the institutional history of Digital Humanities and to serve as a hub for information about institutions, events, publications and people associated with Digital Humanities. Development of this resource, both in terms of the data model and the modeled instances, is ongoing. A feature we will highlight because of its relevance to similar endeavors is our use of EntitySchemas to (partially) document our data model in a machine-readable manner and to ensure the consistency of our data.

15-20min

• Wikidata as the Central Provider of PIDs in the European Literary Bibliography (ELB)

  • Vojtěch Malínek, Tomasz Umerle

  • The European Literary Bibliography (ELB) is a platform that collects, harmonizes, and presents bibliographic data on literature and literary studies from various national sources. ELB aims to integrate data from open resources provided by European providers. Currently, the platform includes data from the Czech Republic, Finland, Poland, and Spain. To enrich the data and ensure consistency, ELB uses Wikidata as a central source of persistent identifiers (PIDs). This approach links bibliographic records in ELB to the wealth of information available in Wikidata, particularly in the area of shared authority files. Integration with Wikidata not only enhances data consistency, but also facilitates statistical analyses and enables the development of analytical tools for exploring the entire ELB database.

[lunch break]

15min

• DARIAH Working Group DHWiki, a new community space (David Lindemann, Gustavo Candela, other group members)

  • Since September 2024, this working group has been a common form of individuals interested in Wikidata and Wikibase coming from GLAM, DH research, and Wikimedia backgrounds. The group maintains a Wikibase instance and a Zotero group, and aims at being present and available for the community in different fora. We briefly introduce the group, the members, and their communication channels.

30min

• Wikibase/Wikidata as a research tool in the classroom

  • Luís Trigo, Vera Moitinho de Almeida, Tiago Assis, André Barbosa

  • Starting 2023, inspired by the eViterbo project, Wikibase has been deployed in different courses at the University of Porto; this initiative aims to provide several instances of open high-quality data, and a flourishing citizen science environment. Some examples are CreoPhonPt, Opustessellatum, Porto Renascentista & Barroco, ParVO and BioImages.

Q&A

15 min

• How data is modeled, uploaded, edited, and queried on a Wikibase (David Lindemann)

  • Wikibase enables the collaborative creation of structured datasets in the shape of a Knowledge Graph; it combines interface-based editing and different methods of batch upload and edit while keeping a detailed and reversible edit history. Workflows and related tools known from Wikidata are mostly deployable for any Wikibase instance, which includes all entity types (“items” describing entities or concepts, properties, lexemes, and also entity schemes). We present how Wikibase stores and represents data, and how data is queried.

15 min

• Presentation of the Wikibase Cloud service, from the user perspective (Christos Varvantakis, David Lindemann)

  • How do you set up an account for Wikibase Cloud? How do you create an instance? And most importantly, how do you establish the basics of modeling your database and start populating it? This presentation will address such questions, alongside a discussion of the origins, the basic functionalities and some use cases of Wikibase Cloud and related tools

[break]

90min

• Q&A Wikibase Onboarding session (DHwiki group members, supported remotely by the Wikibase Cloud team in Berlin)